Archive for the ‘search engine marketing’ Category

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Building Links To Your Site

Friday, November 14th, 2008

Excellent article on getting links from Eric Ward, the guy who invented the practice.

Despite what fly-by-night Internet marketers may say, it is not brain surgery and there are no secret tricks. It is all about writing content people find helpful and want to read.

Here are the key points from the article:

  • You need to be passionate about your business to write original, helpful and link-worthy content.
  • Play to your strengths. You can’t rank top for everything, so pick a set of keywords you want to rank highly for, and add value to your site by building content around them.
  • Always be on the lookout for sites that might like to link to your content. Scan the web for news and information sites, resource collections, blogs and social media that are relevant to your industry. Be aware of what’s happening and what the hot issues are.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted in Links, internet promotion, search engine marketing | Comments Off

What Is Online Marketing? – The Series

Thursday, June 1st, 2006

I just finished a series of articles on the basics of online marketing for WritersWeekly.com, the freelance writing site we own:

# What Is Online Marketing? – Part 1 of 6
http://www.writersweekly.com/this_weeks_article/003402_04262006.html

# What Is Online Marketing? – Part 2 of 6: The Web Site
http://www.writersweekly.com/this_weeks_article/003419_05032006.html

# What Is Online Marketing? – Part 3 of 6: Search Engine/Directory Registration
http://www.writersweekly.com/this_weeks_article/003431_05102006.html

# What Is Online Marketing? – Part 4 of 6: Getting Links
http://www.writersweekly.com/this_weeks_article/003443_05172006.html

# What Is Online Marketing? – Part 5 of 6: Joining The Discussion
http://www.writersweekly.com/this_weeks_article/003450_05242006.html

# What Is Online Marketing? – Part 6 of 6: Online Advertising
http://www.writersweekly.com/this_weeks_article/003467_05312006.html

Posted in blogs and rss, email marketing, grassroots promotion, internet promotion, search engine marketing | Comments Off

Sending Out Masses Of Press Releases

Friday, April 7th, 2006

Lynne Taetzsch of artbylt.com askes:

I wonder if anyone has used the services offered at GetBookReviews.com, and
how beneficial sending out masses of press releases about a book is for POD
published books?

Thanks,

Lynne

I couldn’t find any complaints about the service. However, I see they seem to resell advertising in Forward Magazine – a pay-for-placement review service that drew heat a few years back.

Services like this could be worth it…but not for the reasons you might think.

If you think reporters will “discover” you and rush to interview you, forget it. Interviews like that generally happen when you, or a PR professional, approach reporters one-on-one – matching the story angle to what the reporters cover.

Services like GetBookReviews.com automate press release distribution. So the release is generic and goes to a general email address. You might get some interest, but I wouldn’t count on it.

The value of these services is actually not in the media outlets they send to, but in the web sites they send to.

There are many web sites that use press releases as content. So you can get information about your book placed on a lot of web sites in one simple step.

An alternative service you might consider is WebWire. This service is optimized to place the release in the new sections of all the major search engines.

Posted in grassroots promotion, press coverage, search engine marketing | No Comments »

Blog Blast

Friday, January 20th, 2006

Sorry for the long delay between posts. I’m failing to heed my own advice.

Once of our authors at Booklocker.com sent an email asking about a piece of software called Blog Blast, which promises to place your ad on 2 million sites.

As a veteran of the online marketing world, when I hear about software like this I’m immediately skeptical. If it was really that easy, everyone would be doing it.

So when I investigated, I wasn’t too surprised to find out it is not legit.

Blog Blast is a tool for doing comment spam – basically placing fake comments containing your link on random blogs.

The “theory” behind comment spam is that these postings will appear to search engines as a link to your site from the blogs in question. Among other things, search engines look at how many sites are linking to your site. So this practice should raise your visibility in the search engines.

And for a while it did work, until the search engines got wise to it.

Today search engines look at the quality of the sites that are linking to your site. A bunch of links from low-quality, irrelevant sites actually hurts your search engine ranking. Plus, comment spam is so prevalent (this modest blog alone gets about 50 per day) that most blogging software packages have systems built-in to block it. So not only is this software doing something unethical, any comments Blog Blast does submit are just going to be blocked anyway.

For more opinions on this particular tool, see:

http://chrisbloor.com/blog/?p=29
http://zog.typepad.com/malaysia/2005/11/blog_blaster_he.html
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff166722.htm
http://www.thedeadhand.com/blogs/jscroft/archive/2005/11/27/14163.aspx

Posted in blogs and rss, grassroots promotion, search engine marketing | Comments Off

Different People Get Different Results from Google

Monday, December 19th, 2005

Here is a good article on why people who do the same search on Google can get different results.

Why do I see different Google results than my clients?

Essentially, the answer is this: Google is pulling its results from any one of an estimated 80 different data centers spread throughout the country. Which data center is dependent on the geographic location of the searcher. Those data centers aren’t in perfect sych with each other.

Posted in search engine marketing | No Comments »

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